You’re kinda-sorta comfortable doing performance tuning on SQL Server. You’ve read a few blogs, you monitor Page Life Expectancy, you rebuild your indexes, and you add an index here or there. However, you haven’t been to a day-long performance tuning class yet, and you’re wondering what you’re missing.

Thing is, in SQL Server, performance tuning changes fast. One day Perfmon counters are in, and the next day they’re out. It’s totally okay if you’re still using SQL Server 2008 – that’s not the problem. You shouldn’t be wearing hammer pants, and you shouldn’t be looking at PLE, monitoring Disk Queue Length, or putting your data and log files on separate drives.

In this rapid-fire session, Erik and I will show you specific examples of why performance tuning tips and tricks have fallen out of fashion, and why they’re not too legit to quit:

You can get the slides and demos here.

(While there’s some awesome historical photos of Erik and I in here, PASS didn’t include the video camera recordings. That’s kind of a bummer because I had some awesome costumes.)

If you learned stuff in that session, that’s a good thing: it means that while your skills might be drifting out of date, you can still catch back up. Erik and I are doing a full-day pre-con at the Summit called Expert Performance Tuning for SQL Server 2016 & 2017. Go read more about that, check out the cool free stuff you’ll get for attending, and then register now. See you in Seattle!